The Big Local Trust has been set up to help local areas decide how to spend their allocations. Each area is assigned a representative, who works with local residents and community development workers and acts as a mediator with the trust. Other partner organisations – Renaisi, UnLtd and Capacity Global provide advice on specialist areas such as regeneration, social enterprise and sustainability.

The Big Local programme is still in its early days, but there are promising signs that its work is genuinely resident-led. One reason for this is the requirement for 50% of the project steering board to be made up of local residents before the funding is allocated. Some of those working on the project are also impressed by how different it is from previous regeneration schemes.

Anna Allen, the Big Local representative for the Lumbertubs, Lings and Blackthorne area of Northampton, is encouraging residents in the three neighbourhoods to work more closely together. She says the £1m budget that Big Local brings to an area often attracts residents' attention, but the challenge is to get them thinking beyond that.

"My job is to explain that it is not just about the money but about the vision for the community. That's when people start to work together productively. The first step is getting people involved. The other stages like creating the Big Local plan is time limited but the community engagement aspect is about setting up an ongoing process."

Allen says there is often a lack of trust in national regeneration programmes among local residents. In Lumbertubs, Lings and Blackthorn, residents representing two residents' associations were determined that the group steering this project should be rooted in the community rather than being owned by an outside organisation.

Margaret Pritchard, who is on the Big Local steering group, was one of those residents who thought that by volunteering there would be more chance of the community staying in control. "I put my name down to help to form a group to engage with the community. Since then, we've tried to reach out to the community through our existing activities and asked people what improvements they would like to see."

In Ipswich much of the focus of the project has been on bringing together residents in three neighbourhoods in the town's north west. With help from the local council for voluntary services, the steering group made up of residents of Whitton, Whitehouse and Castle Hill has concentrated on sharing information about projects, activities and funding streams that already operate in the area.

Ron Impey, a steering group member, was already involved in his local area but welcomes the opportunity to meet like-minded people from the other neighbourhoods. "It has brought together people who otherwise wouldn't have got together," he says. "We have tended to do things separately. We have each got our strengths that we can share with others."

North West Ipswich Big Local Trust officer Leah Douglas says many residents were not aware what was already going on in the area. She has noticed that instead of saying that a neighbourhood needs something for younger people, residents will now suggest a specific project they know has worked in other parts of the town.

She sees the Big Local as building on neighbourhood management work. "When people make decisions about real money and are held to account that's when they get excited and really engage in the decision. At first, there is a lot of scepticism and mistrust, including of the local council. We've had to do a lot of reassurance."

Many Big Local areas are places that have missed out on regeneration funding in the past. But Anna Allen believes that the programme's approach to regeneration marks a departure from previous schemes.

"It is different in the way it is set up," she explains. "Each area moves at its own speed. There are not too many rules and details imposed on them."

Allen adds that it is also about a different way of working to previous approaches that have put too much emphasis on an area's deprivation. "It is about respect and pride for the area," she says. "Some of these neighbourhoods are deprived areas but each one has potential. It's about finding positive things rather than saying 'you're deprived – that's why you are getting the money'."

Carl Adams a development worker for the Big Local in Northfleet, north Kent, says the worst thing to do is to go into an area and say, "the glass is half empty". Instead, he looked for positive things to tap into, such as Northfleet's pride in its heritage – exemplified by the local history society's waiting list of 150 people.

"They are so proud of what used to happen here," he says. "I used that to engage with the members. If you walk around the streets and talk to the people who live here, the community spirit is stronger than the beautiful villages that are supposed to be nice places to live."

During the year the Northfleet steering group has succeeded in reviving three residents' associations, persuaded multinational aggregates company Lafarge to gift the community some land for a playground and reopened a disused Sure Start centre for a part-time community music project.

With just £1m to spend over 10 years, Adams says it is all about the little things, and how you reinvest the money. But he says he has also seen a transformation in the confidence of residents and learned a lot from them, including how to consult the parents of young children.

"Just stick up a bouncy castle," he says. "If you say come to a community centre, no one will turn up. If you put up a bouncy castle and throw some burgers on a grill, they will come."